Quotes & Sayings About The Jesuits

My History of the Jesuits is in four volumes ... This society has been a greater calamity to mankind than the French Revolution, or Napoleon's despotism or ideology. It has obstructed progress of reformation and the improvement of the human mind in society much longer and more fatally. — John Adams

A modern historian has described the struggle between Jews and Jesuits as a "struggle between two rivals," in which the "higher Jesuit clergy and the Jewish plutocracy stood facing one another in the middle of France like two invisible lines of battle."50 The description is true insofar as the Jews found in the Jesuits their first unappeasable foes, while the latter came promptly to realize how powerful a weapon antisemitism could be. This was the first attempt and the only one prior to Hitler to exploit the "major political concept"51 of antisemitism on a Pan-European scale. — Hannah Arendt

This society [Jesuits] has been a greater calamity to mankind than the French Revolution, or Napoleon's despotism or ideology. It has obstructed the progress of reformation and the improvement of the human mind in society much longer and more fatally.

{Letter to Thomas Jefferson, November 4, 1816. Adams wrote an anonymous 4 volume work on the destructive history of the Jesuits} — John Adams

But ... that's absurd!" he cried, blushing. "Your poem praises Jesus, it doesn't revile him ... as you meant it to. And who will believe you about freedom? Is that, is that any way to understand it? It's a far cry from the Orthodox idea ... It's Rome, and not even the whole of Rome, that isn't true - they're the worst of Catholicism, the Inquisitors, the Jesuits ... ! But there could not even possibly be such a fantastic person as your Inquisitor. What sins do they take on themselves? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It's always gratifying to share a hobby with a friend, and pining for erstwhile suitors falls into that category. In the months to come, Libby and I would analyze our respective exes with the gusto and intellectual rigor of Jesuits. — Patricia Marx

The Armenians will willingly harbor
revolutionaries, arrange for their entertainment and the furthering of their ends. The pride of race brings about many singularities and prompts the Armenians to prey on missionaries, Jesuits, consuls and European traveler with rapacity and ingratitude. The poor Armenians will demand assistance in a loud tone, yet will seldom give thanks for a donation. Abuse of Consular officers and missionaries is only a part of the stock-in-trade of the extra-Armenian press. — Mark Sykes

Learning about Poverty'. 'Two young American Jesuits showed up at the Jesuit headquarters in Rome. Father Arrupe asked what assignment had brought them there. They explained that they were on their way to India to work with the poor, as part of their training. Afterward Arrupe said to an assistant, 'it certainly costs us a lot of money to teach our men about poverty'. — James Martin

I entered the diocesan seminary. I liked the Dominicans, and I had Dominican friends. But then I chose the Society of Jesus, which I knew well because the seminary was entrusted to the Jesuits. Three things in particular struck me about the Society: the missionary spirit, community and discipline. — Pope Francis

Well, I've been in several films including documentaries, but the big blockbuster, I was hired as advisor to the actors, I was trying to make Jesuits out of them. — Daniel Berrigan

Jesuits so dominated the study of earthquakes that seismology became known as 'the Jesuit Science. — Thomas E. Woods Jr.

I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counterreformist and has been influenced by the methodical path of the Jesuits ... It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation. DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that all can reach salvation. — Umberto Eco

Without the Jesuits you wouldn't be enjoying your gin and tonic. — James Martin

I do not like the late resurrection of the Jesuits ... If ever any congregation of men could merit eternal perdition on earth, and in hell, according to these historians, though, like Pascal, true Catholics, it is this company of Loyolas. — John Adams

The Jesuits were good educators, exceptional teachers. In an era and in a society where freedom of speech was not held in high regard, of course, that the discourse be focused on what they were teaching, but we were able to go beyond this framework without incurring too great a risk. — Pierre Trudeau

I'm very interested in the history of Christianity, and what I can say for sure is that the Catholics and the Jesuits and stuff were very big on teaching and on learning. — Ben Mendelsohn

The war, the American Civil War of 1861-1865, would never have been possible without the sinister influence of the Jesuits. — Abraham Lincoln

The Jesuits I know who have died and all their lives were great teachers, they're the least remembered people. — Daniel Berrigan

Marists are workers, we do all the work and Jesuits just think about it. — Warren Mundine

Philosophers see no harm in the Jesuits other than in their effect on humanity and the sciences. The vulgar and especially the prejudiced only hate them from an envy and jealousy born out of conspiracy and intrigue at an organisation which overshadows them. — Cesare Beccaria

The homosexuals are the new Jesuits. — Laurent Binet

It is now an article of absolute faith among Republicans that 'the government' is an entity separate from 'the American people,' which they say the same way that the old Jesuits talked about 'the mystical Body of Christ.' It is now an ironclad commandment of conservative orthodoxy that 'the government' is something parasitic and alien. — Charlie Pierce

And because people loved conspiracy theories even back then, suddenly everyone became a member of the Illuminati: Galileo, the Babylonian goddess Lilith, Lucifer, and eventually even the Jesuits themselves. — Ferdinand Von Schirach

...to lead an individual along a spiritual path consonant with the person's gifts and personality...[The Jesuit training of novitiates and lay students] — John W. O'Malley

The last lingering shadow of the Jesuit, gliding behind curtains and concealing himself in cupboards, faded from my young life about the time when I first caught a distant glimpse of the late Father Bernard Vaughan. He was the only Jesuit I ever knew in those days; and as you could generally hear him half a mile away, he seemed to be ill-selected for the duties of a curtain-glider. — G.K. Chesterton

Remember that God is everywhere, all around us, constantly reaching out to us, even in the most unlikely situations. — The Irish Jesuits

The Jesuits have a vow to obey the pope, but if the pope is a Jesuit, maybe he should have a vow to obey the superior general ... I feel like I'm still a Jesuit in terms of my spirituality, what I have in my heart. — Pope Francis

The self must be a tense bow. It must struggle with opposites rather than harmonize them, rather than turn the tension over to the great instruments of last manhood the skilled bow unbenders and Jesuits of our days, the psychiatrists, who, in the same spirit and as part of the same conspiracy of modernity as the peace virtuosos, reduce conflict. — Allan Bloom

My parents spent an awful lot of money sending me to the best possible schools, and I came out of my exams and thought, 'I don't really want to do a degree.' I did philosophy with the Jesuits for about a year, and then I joined a bank. While I was there, I saw an ad in an Irish paper for radio announcers. — Terry Wogan

My history of the Jesuits is not elegantly written, but is supported by unquestionable authorities, is very particular and very horrible. Their restoration is indeed "a step toward darkness," cruelty, perfidy, despotism, death and I wish we were out of danger of bigotry and Jesuitism. — John Adams

There is no other name that mankind can be saved accept in the name of Jesus Christ, the saviour of the world. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Ah sir," replied Caderousse, "we cannot console those who will not be consoled, and he was one of these; besides, I know not why, but he seemed to dislike seeing me. One night, however, I heard his sobs, and I could not resist my desire to go up to him, but when I reached his door he was no longer weeping but praying.
I cannot now repeat to you, sir, all the eloquent words and imploring language he made use of; it was more than piety, it was more than grief, and I, who am no canter, and hate the Jesuits, said then to myself, 'It is really well, and I am very glad that I have not any children; for if I were a father and felt such excessive grief as the old man does, and did not find in my memory or heart all he is now saying, I should throw myself into the sea at once, for I could not bear it. — Alexandre Dumas

We're pupils of the religions - Catholic, Protestant, Jewish ... Well, the Christian religions. Those who directed French education down through the centuries were the Jesuits. They taught us how to make sentences translated from the Latin, well balanced, with a verb, a subject, a complement, a rhythm. In short - here a speech, there a preach, everywhere a sermon! They say of an author, "He knits a nice sentence!" Me, I say, "It's unreadable." They say, "What magnificent theatrical language!" I look, I listen. It's flat, it's nothing, it's nil. Me, I've slipped the spoken word into print. In one sole shot. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Before I met the Jesuits, I'd never encountered another group who thought that intellect and arrogance were treasures beyond price and necessities in waging wars against blasphemers, heretics. — Pat Conroy

Ricci created memory palaces in his mind. Each item in the palace represented a series of concepts. The rooms and locations within the palace served as directories and files, similar to computer data storage. Ricci instantaneously learned, retained and retrieved hundreds of new Chinese kanji, to the astonished delight of Chinese nobles. — Janet M. Tavakoli

The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being burned at the stake, suggested new modes of tortures to their tormentors. Being superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they were superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer; and the law to do as you would be done by fell with less persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for their part, did not care how they were done by, who loved their enemies after a new fashion, and came very near freely forgiving them all they did. — Henry David Thoreau

The Illuminati Order was preceded in the 1500's in Spain by the 'Alumbrados', a Christian heresy started by crypto-Jews called 'Marranos'. The founder of the Jesuit Order, Ignatius of Loyola, was a Marrano / Alumbrado. Thus when people today argue whether it is the Jesuits or Zionists or Illuminati who are responsible for our troubles, they are really talking about the same beast. — Henry Makow

The Jesuits are a MILITARY organization, not a religious order. Their chief is a general of an army, not the mere father abbot of a monastery. And the aim of this organization is power - power in its most despotic exercise - absolute power, universal power, power to control the world by the volition of a single man. Jesuitism is the most absolute of despotisms - and at the same time the greatest and most enormous of abuses. — Napoleon Bonaparte

By what route the infant Hansen found his way to the Jesuits, the file did not relate. Perhaps the mother converted. Those were dark years still, and if expediency required it, she may have swallowed her Protestant convictions to buy the boy a decent education. Give the Jesuits his soul, she may have reasoned, and they will give him a brain. Or perhaps she sensed in her son from early on the mercurial nature that later ruled his life, and she determined to subordinate him to a stronger religious discipline than was offered by the easy-going Protestants. If so, she was wise. — John Le Carre

We invent casuistical arguments for ourselves, we take a lesson from the Jesuits, and, for a time, contrive to allay our own doubts and convince ourselves that what we are doing is necessary, absolutely necessary, in a good cause. That is the way we are made; it is all as clear as daylight. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If history is written by the victors, conspiracy theory is typically written by the losers, and there were few greater losers in the revolution than the French church and especially the Jesuits. — Mike Jay

Dan Brown is a character from 'Foucault's Pendulum!' I invented him. He shares my characters' fascinations - the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist. — Umberto Eco

I do not like the reappearance of the Jesuits ... Shall we not have regular swarms of them here, in as many disguises as only a king of the gipsies can assume, dressed as printers, publishers, writers and schoolmasters? If ever there was a body of men who merited damnation on earth and in Hell, it is this society of Loyola's. Nevertheless, we are compelled by our system of religious toleration to offer them an asylum. — John Adams

It was served of the Jesuits, that they constantly inculcated a thorough contempt of worldly things in their doctrines, but eagerly grasped at them in their lives. They were wise in their generation; for they cried down worldly things because they wanted to obtain them, and cried up spiritual things, because they wanted to dispose of them. — Charles Caleb Colton

Inevitably. But women, as you may have observed, have no principles. My family don't feel my pangs of conscience. The end being to bring you and Rachel together again, my wife and daughters pass over the means employed to gain it, as composedly as if they were Jesuits." "I — Wilkie Collins

After learning the language and culture of the Chinese people, these Jesuits began to establish contacts with the young intellectuals of the country. — Hu Shih

The sky [above Tehran] was like a star-eaten black blanket, and so far as I could read them its constellations were unfamiliar. Lawrence speaks somewhere of drawing 'strength from the depths of the universe'; Malcolm Lowry speaks about the deadness of the stars except when he looked at them with a particular girl; I had neither feeling. The founder of the Jesuits used to spend many hours under the stars; it is hard to be certain whether his first stirrings of scientific speculation or pre-scientific wonder about space and the stars in their own nature were some element in his affinity with starlight, or whether for him they were only a point of departure, but in this matter I think I am about fifty years more modern than Saint Ignatius; stars mean to me roughly what they meant to Donne's generation, a bright religious sand imposing the sense of an intrusion into human language, and arousing a certain personal thirst to be specific. — Peter Levi

The Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648, was a series of conflicts that became the last great struggle of religious wars in Europe. It was fought almost exclusively on German soil ... but before the war ended, it involved most of the nations of Europe. The underlying cause of the war was the deep-seated hostility between the German Protestants and German Catholics - with the Jesuits and Cardinal Richelieu, who was the real ruler of France, fanning the fires to accomplish their ends. — John Daniel

Aristotle was convinced that a trained memory helped the development of logical thought processes. — Janet M. Tavakoli

In the agreement to rescue Rome [i.e., the Roman Catholic Church's hierarchy] from the predicament of losing its world control to Protestantism, and to preserve the spiritual and temporal supremacy which the popes [had] 'usurped' during the Middle Ages, Rome now 'sold' the [Roman Catholic] Church to the Society of Jesus [i.e., the Jesuits]; in essence the popes surrendered themselves into their hands. — John Daniel

Strive to engage in activities that require constant self-development. Nurture and develop the physical body, but also our spiritual nature. We exist for a purpose: to honor our spirituality. When we do, we cannot help but love others. Hurting others is easily recognized as a crime against ourselves. It's no coincidence that all religions teach this at their core. — Janet M. Tavakoli

The simpler explanation,' Emerson with a distinct uvular component in his Sigh, 'may be that none of you people has ever known a moment of Transcendence in his life, nor would recognize one did it walk up and bit yese in the Arse, - and in the long sorry Silence, grows the suspicion that Jesuits are but the latest instance of a true Christian passion evaporated away, leaving no more than the usual hollow desires for Authority and mindless O-bedience. — Thomas Pynchon

It was not reason that besieged Troy; it was not reason that sent forth the Saracen from the desert to conquer the world; that inspired the crusades; that instituted the monastic orders; it was not reason that produced the Jesuits; above all, it was not reason that created the French Revolution. Man is only great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination. — Benjamin Disraeli

Jesuits like to invite people into imaginative prayer. That's a classic Jesuit way to pray - to say, what would it look like, sound like, feel like to be in certain parts of the Bible. — Anonymous

Narcissists have poor self-esteem, but they are typically very successful. They feel entitled; they're self-important; they crave admiration and lack empathy. They are also exploitative and envious. The malignant types never forget a slight. They may kill you ten years later for cutting them off in traffic. But they act perfectly normal while plotting their revenge. — Janet M. Tavakoli

A cure by regression is homeopathic, like healing the damage done by ministers and ignorance with stupidity and Jesuits. — Franz Grillparzer

To me, it doesn't matter if your scapegoats are the Jews, the homosexuals, the male sex, the Masons, the Jesuits, the Welfare Parasites, the Power Elite, the female sex, the vegetarians, or the Communist Party. To the extent that you need a scapegoat, you simply have not got your brain programmed to work as an efficient problem-solving machine. — Robert Anton Wilson

Up until the 1950s the subject of the missionary movement was referred to as "missions" in the plural form. In fact, the term "missions" was first used in its current context by the Jesuits in the sixteenth century. But the International Missionary Council discussions in the 1950s on the missio- Dei convinced most that the mission of the Triune God was prior to any of the number of missions by Christians during the two millennia of church history. Consequently, since there was only one mission, the plural form has dropped out of familir usage and the singular form, "mission," has replaced it for the most part. Nevertheless, most churches and lay-persons hang on the plural missions. For that reason, and to make our point clear here, we will refer to it in this work from time to time while alerting believers to the coming change. — Walter C. Kaiser Jr.

Think I am? Smothered in fancy furs? The food churned in my stomach. I gagged. I ran to her backyard and threw it all up. Out she came. Look at what he did. Thrun up his First Communion breakfast. Thrun up the body and blood of Jesus. I have God in me backyard. What am I goin' to do? I'll take him to the Jesuits for they know the sins of the Pope himself. — Frank McCourt

Colombia's advance to first rank among the criminal states in "our little region" is in part the result of the decline in US-managed state terror in Central America, which achieved its primary aims as in Turkey 10 years later, leaving in its wake a "culture of terror" that "domesticat[es] the expectations of the majority" and undermines aspirations towards "alternatives different to those of the powerful," in the words of Salvadoran Jesuits, who learned the lessons from bitter experience; those who survived the US assault, that is. — Noam Chomsky

You never observe a great intellectual movement in Europe in which the
Jews do NOT greatly participate. The first Jesuits were Jews. — Benjamin Disraeli

The Jesuits had learned that a Christian mission to China could never succeed if it were not in a position to show and convince the Chinese intelligentsia of the superiority of the European culture. — Hu Shih

The FBI had been a man's world - usually men of Irish or Italian heritage schooled by Jesuits and raised in a closed culture of police and priests. — Tim Weiner